‘In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock. Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them. The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around. In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.’

• Like Snopes, But For Comics … Metafilter post on comics ‘urban legends’. For example, which Pet Shop Boy was a Marvel Editor?
  
  
• Defining the Mentalist in Fundamentalist … this post links to Stewart Lee’s TV program on blasphamy in comedy which is available on YouTube. The post includes a fabulous description of Alan Moore as ‘a strikingly hirsuite man in the manner of a wilderness prophet.’
  
  
• They Saved Hitler’s Self-Hating Jewish Sea-Monkeys … another comics urban legend… The twisted man behind those Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray Specs adverts in comics. From the post: ‘I think there’s some subclause to Godwin whereby the phrase “Sea-Monkeys” un-Godwins any post.’

1. Grab a calculator
2. Key in the first three digits of your phone number (NOT the area code)
3. Multiply by 80
4. Add 1
5. Multiply by 250
6. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number
7. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again
8. Subtract 250
9. Divide number by 2